of war and unintended sacrifices
by jaime-lannisters
Summary: they make you promise and swear and pretend to believe until you don't know if you've got anything left of yourself anymore, until you can't remember what vestiges of hope you're fighting for. -— marlene mckinnon and sirius black. minor character bootcamp.


**a/n 1.** ick okay so i just felt like writing and this happened. um.

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marlene mckinnon - - - minor character bootcamp

afraid; **(adj)** feeling fear or anxiety; frightened

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she had a stained glass window for a heart—

a shoebox for a chest cavity, and a kaleidoscope for a soul

_resentment—levi the poet_

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The stars are bright and the moon is full and all she wants to do is ink out all the lights in the sky.

Her mouth shapes to call out BENJY, but she doesn't say anything, because she remembers. There's no point in saying that, because there's nobody on this plane of being that's answer her anyway. Nobody around to answer her.

The truth of the matter is that Benjy's dead, and so is Gideon and Fabian and Dorcas and she's all alone and nobody will ever bring them back, and Hestia's Dumbledore-inspired "plane of being" thing is well-meaning but it's also bullshit and frankly, Marlene's sick of it all.

If it's not a purposeful lie, then it's an impossible vow and they make you promise and swear and pretend to believe until you don't know if you've got anything left of yourself anymore, until you can't remember what vestiges of hope you're fighting for.

Benjy died with his back against the wall, in a million little pieces just like all their shattered hopes. He was brave and good and better than her and now he's dead and she's all alone with her broken beliefs and half-empty bottles.

Gideon and Fabian died together, without anything left to fight for except the refusal to let each other die alone and the sense of duty that saved nameless others at the cost of themselves. They could smile and they could joke and they could lift everyone up and all she can do is tear things down.

Dorcas' death was the most senseless of all, because she wasn't even supposed to be there, she wasn't supposed to be in danger. She risked everything for her love for a boy named Amos that never gave enough of a damn, and it went and got her killed. Marlene should have been there to protect her but she wasn't, Dorcas was alone and now Marlene's all alone with the endless sea of regrets and the constant noise in her head that never lets up.

The stars are still shining as if they have any right, like there's any point in twinkling for a world that lets the good guys die and the bad guys live and the broken people like her fill the space in between.

She could close the curtains or colour the windows black but she thinks that she likes the pain, because it breaks through the numbness and it's anguish and it's exhausting but they deserve better than the overwhelming numbness that otherwise vanquishes her.

She wanders outside in Benjy's old shirt and Gideon's boxers, clutching a bottle from Fabian's stash in one hand and a photo of herself and Dorcas in the other. Her feet are bare and London chills her to the bone, but she's on a mission.

She somehow ends up at the graveyard, where the headstones are even if bodies aren't, and she falls down in front of Dorcas' grave, in between Benjy's and Gideon's.

"I'm sorry," she sobs, "I'm sorry that I wasn't there, I'm sorry that I wasn't more, I'm sorry that I wasn't everything you deserved and I'm sorry that you're gone and I'm not."

Hands rest on her shoulders and pull her in towards a person so she's sobbing into a chest and she's Marlene McKinnon and she's still the most fierce witch of her age, but she doesn't care enough anymore to check who it is.

Fingers stroke her hair softly, whispering meaningless words like "shh" and "okay" and "they know" and "love" in the way that people say things they don't quite believe but want to anyway.

The tears stop and she removes her face from the chest, and looks up into a familiar pair of grey eyes.

"Black," she notes.

"Hey, McKinnon," he greets softly.

"What are you doing here?" she asks, and it's blunt but it's an honest question.

"I'm paying my respects," he says, inclining his head towards the four graves that make her heart twist every time she thinks about them.

She nods. His best friends were always his Marauders, but Benjy, Gideon, Fabian and Dorcas were universally likeable, and you don't have to be their best friend to mourn or respect a life gone by.

They sit there in silence for a while, but it's not the sort of silence where you can just be, it's the type where the noise fills her head and she's just bursting and–

"This is so fundamentally wrong," he says.

She can't help but laugh, a bitter, black, sardonic laugh that poisons the very air it touches. "Sorry, kid, that's what happens when you're in a war that everyone's afraid to pick a side in. People die and people hurt and all for things we believed and didn't understand when we were seventeen," she remarks, unscrewing her bottle and taking a swig.

"I'm sick of people dying," he says, and the thing is, she is too. Death used to mean something, something bigger than anything else and too frightening to contemplate, but that was before she buried her best friends and realised that war defied every rule they'd ever been taught, that there was no fairness and there were no rules and that even when you won, you didn't. With people's lives on the line, if you lost, you lost your fight and everything you fought for, but if you won, you lost your sanity and everything that defined you.

"The only way to stop that is to win the war, and the only thing that's going to happen is that we'll die trying," she tells him. He looks so desperate for relief that she offers him her bottle, which he takes.

He downs some, and grimaces at the taste. "It burns," he comments, and she shakes her head.

"Only enough to make you remember you're alive. Nothing burns more than the memory of abandoned beliefs," she says, remembering when they were seventeen and they believed that things like justice and truth could still prevail, and bites back a sob.

"It's fucking bullshit," he declares. "We fight and we fight for something we don't even know how to defend and we're untrained renegades with a cause we can't hope to win a war for and we're not soldiers and everybody's fucking dying and I– I don't remember how to hope anymore," he says brokenly.

"We're not seventeen anymore, Black," she says, touching his arm. "We were reckless and stupid and Godric, we thought we could save the fucking world, didn't we? With our natural talent and inability to understand that we weren't invincible..."

"We were kids," he reminds her bitterly.

"We were idiots and we signed our own death sentence the day we jumped into a war we didn't understand, and we lost ourselves the first time any of us died. When Benjy died," she throws back fiercely.

"James thinks it'll be worth it," he mutters.

"James is in love," she says sadly. "He has to think that, because he's bringing a child into this. You couldn't live with yourself if you didn't believe that."

"Do you think he's wrong?" he asks her.

"A cause is a concept, something abstract you can't see," she explains. "It's something you believe in, a code to live by, and once you lose it, you're lost. I believed in our fight once upon a time, but I also believed that we'd live forever, and look how that turned out," she says sadly, gesturing at Benjy's headstone. "We're not fighting to win the war, anymore; we're fighting to not give up."

"Giving up would be easier," he ventures, and Godric, she agrees with him, she does, she does, but she can't because that's an insult to her friends that she'll never pay.

"They died because they were scared, they were alone, they weren't good enough, they believed that maybe it could be worth it one day – they died because of a lot of things, a lot of stupid things that make me hate the world and hate them for leaving me nearly as much as I miss them, but I'm not going to give up when they died for this bullshit," she informs him.

"You still believe in this war?" he asks, surprised.

"No," she snaps. "I believe in my friends, and even that's not certain."

"Then why keep fighting?" he questions.

She laughs bitterly and takes her bottle back, drinking from it. "Because I've got nothing left to lose. I've got nothing left to live for. If anything, I still love my family, and those motherfuckers aren't going to get them while I'm still around. They're the only thing I've got left, and the only things worth protecting, and if everyone else I love is dead and buried over some cause that was bigger than any of us and they were too good to die for, then why not me?"

He nods, and she knows that even though the family he's thinking of is a group of three other boys and a redhead, he understands what she's saying. Other than them, he's got nothing left to live for other than the justice that's so hard for them to believe in.

Somehow, the group of seventeen year olds that thought they were invincible are down to these lonely disillusioned souls and the worst part is that she can't even pinpoint when they truly changed.

He sits with her all night, and they watch the graves of their fallen four as the twinkling light of the stars slowly fade out into the morning sky.

This is the war they never intended to sacrifice themselves to, and now they're dying in every way.

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**a/n 2.** well, i'm using this as the first fic for minor character bootcamp. don't you just love when inspiration works for you? anyway, it's not the greatest, but any feedback's super appreciated and while i adore favourites, please leave a review too! xx


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